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Chapter 7: The Essence Is at Ease

From the time I recognized the road,I realized I had nothing to do with birth and death.

Walking is Zen, sitting is Zen;Talking or silent, moving, unmoving, -The essence is at ease.

Entering the deep mountainsI live in quiet solitude.The hills are high, the valleys deepWhen one lives beneath an old pine tree.

There are three ordinary states of consciousness. One is waking, jagrut, the second is swapna, dreaming, and the third is sushupti, dreamless, deep sleep.

Man ordinarily lives in these three states, sometimes waking, sometimes dreaming, sometimes fast asleep. This is the wheel that man moves in. And because of these three states of mind many things have arisen in human consciousness and in human culture, civilization.

The first kind of consciousness, waking, creates its own culture, its own civilization. The West represents it. The second kind of culture is created by the second consciousness, dreaming; the East represents it. That’s why you find it very difficult to communicate; the Western mind finds it almost impossible to communicate with the Eastern mind. It is not only a question of language. You may understand the language - the question is of the orientation.

The waking consciousness is objective; it thinks of the object, of the reality there outside. It is a kind of concentration. The Western mind has evolved powers of concentration, hence the birth of science. Out of the powers of concentration science is born. The East could not give birth to science, and the reason is that the East has not paid much attention to the first kind of consciousness.

The East thinks in terms of dreams, the East thinks in terms of the inner, the East thinks in terms of the subjective. The East thinks with closed eyes, the West thinks with open eyes. The West concentrates, the Eastern mind meditates - that’s why in the East you will find visionaries, poets, people who have experienced great revelations inside. But they cannot prove it; the experiences remain individual, private. The Western emphasis is on the objective, the public: when you are wakeful, whatsoever you see others can also see. You are seeing me here, everybody can see me - anyone who has eyes can see - there is no need for any proof. The sun rises, and you know it: in the very experience the proof exists. And everybody is experiencing it; there can be a collective consensus about it. But when I say I have seen the sun rise in the evening it is no longer collective experience, it is no longer objective; it becomes subjective.